In 1948, one internationally recognized sovereign state (Israel) was invaded by the armies of various neighboring sovereign states (Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon). At the end of that war, much of the former British Mandate of Palestine was in Israeli hands, but the West Bank wound up with Jordan and the Gaza Strip with Egypt. Over the next two decades, nobody referred to Egypt’s or Jordan’s exercise of its sovereignty in those lands under loaded terms such as “settlement”.
In 1967, the Arabs tried again to wipe out Israel, and again failed. And this time their defeat was even more total: Egypt lost the Gaza Strip (and the Sinai) and Jordan lost the West Bank. That was half-a-century ago. One of the most basic laws of war is: to the victor the spoils. If you launch a war and you lose, then the guy who took your territory is the one who determines its future. Instead, the “international community” decided to intervene in the matter in a way it has in no other supposed boundary dispute.
Thus began the “Palestiniazation” of the problem. Uniquely in such matters, the victorious sovereign state is forbidden from returning the spoils of war to the defeated sovereign states – Jordan and Egypt. Instead, it can only treat with the designated representatives of “Palestine”, who … have no interest in nation-building, or capacity for it, only in Jew-killing.
To repeat: the “international community”‘s treatment of this issue is like no other boundary dispute of the last 200 years. Maybe that’s because this situation is unique to one small patch of land in the Middle East. Or maybe it’s because the “international community” really really doesn’t like Jews.
I say that Israel (independent since 1948), Jordan (1946) and Egypt (1922) are all sovereign states entitled to act in their own interests, and live with the consequences – especially after two or three generations.
Mark Steyn, “License to Dye”, Steyn Online, 2016-12-30.
October 25, 2018
QotD: The unique situation of Israel
September 16, 2018
Early Arab Conquests | 3 Minute History
Jabzy
Published on 13 Dec 2015Covering the conquests during the Rashidun Caliphate. I will probably do a separate video on the First Fitna.
Thanks for the 15,000 subs. And thanks to Xios, Alan Haskayne, Lachlan Lindenmayer, Derpvic, Seth Reeves and all my other Patrons. If you want to help out – https://www.patreon.com/Jabzy?ty=h
August 16, 2018
Three Great British Wartime Deceptions
Lindybeige
Published on 15 Aug 2018http://www.audible.com/Lindybeige or text ‘Lindybeige’ to 500 500 for a free thirty-day trial and one free audio book.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/LindybeigeTales of Gallipoli and the Dardanelles in World War One, El Alamein in WW2, and of the extraordinarily successful failure that was Operation Camilla in East Africa. One man with terrific hair rambles for over half an hour about ruses of deceit against the enemies of the Empire.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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July 29, 2018
Carving up the Middle East and Preempting Rommel I BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1920 Part 3 of 4
TimeGhost History
Published on 27 Jul 2018In 1920 the colonial powers of the British Empire and France reverse course on their commitment to grant independence to the peoples of the Middle East. In a game to grab the oil fields of Arabia, Syria and Mesopotamia, and to control the Suez Canal they tighten their grip on the region, with far ranging consequences that will shape the world well into the 21st century.
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written and directed by: Spartacus Olsson
Research Contributed by: Jonas Yazo Srouji
Produced by: Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus OlssonA TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH
June 15, 2018
QotD: Churchill on Montgomery
There was a brief firestorm in Britain when a photograph appeared in the press of Montgomery and Gen. Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, the commander of the Afrika Korps and the highest-ranking German captured at Alamein. After his capture Thoma was brought to the Eighth Army command post, where Montgomery accorded him the respect of one honorable professional soldier to another. The two dined that night, and the photograph of the two generals led Brendan Bracken to send Churchill a memo criticizing Montgomery’s naïveté and noting that it created a bad impression with the public. Churchill merely commented: “I sympathize with Gen. von Thoma. Defeated, humiliated, in captivity, and,” after pausing for effect, “dinner with General Montgomery.”
Carlo d’Este, Warlord: A life of Winston Churchill at war, 1874-1945, 2008.
April 4, 2018
3,200 Year Old Stone May FINALLY Solve SEA PEOPLE Mystery
Beyond Science
Published on 12 Oct 2017Was it solved?
April 2, 2018
The Five Forms of Ancient Egyptian Writing!
The Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages
Published on 12 Mar 2018In this brief video I discuss the five different forms of writing in Ancient Egypt!
March 10, 2018
Invasions of the Sea Peoples: Egypt & The Late Bronze Age Collapse
History Time
Published on 3 Sep 2017*****This was one of the first videos I ever made.******Subscribe for much better narration on the newer videos and tons more historical awesomeness*****
The years between around 1500 and 1200 BC are often cited as some of the most prosperous that the world had ever seen. The Eastern Mediterranean world inhabited by the Egyptians, the Hittites and the Minoans, as well as numerous smaller states around them, was a truly cosmopolitan system rarely seen in world history. Greek and Hittite trade goods regularly show up in archaeological sites in Egypt, whereas Egyptian hieroglyphs and trade goods are found in places such as the island of Crete and Mycenae. One shipwreck off the coast of Turkey carried goods from nine different states aboard.
As evidenced by substantial diplomatic communications as well as trade, the world of the Late Bronze Age was a vast interconnected system. The culmination of an unbroken cultural line which had existed since the first cities three thousand years before. Little did the inhabitants of these lands know however that from around 1200 BC their world would catastrophically and violently fall apart in a decades long cataclysm known as the Late Bronze Age Collapse.
Significant archaeological evidence relates that a huge number of cities and settlements were violently destroyed during the period 1210-1130 BC. In Asia Minor the mighty Hittite Empire collapsed. In Greece and the Mediterranean, the kingdoms and city states of the Mycenaean Greeks and the Minoans similarly fell apart. In Canaan and Syria vast and ancient city states were razed, with half written SOS messages written in cuneiform left to be discovered thousands of years later. In scenes reminiscent of the fall of the Western Roman Empire vast numbers of people throughout the eastern Mediterranean fled from their settlements by the shore to take refuge on fortified hill tops.
Just one of the great civilisations of the late Bronze age survived the collapse and told the tale of what happened. Egypt. Led by the Pharoah Ramesses III, often regarded as the last of the great Egyptian Pharaohs, and certainly the last New Kingdom ruler to wield any substantial authority. Inscriptions written during his reign tell of a vast coalition of warlike peoples who descended upon the civilised world during his reign, destroying it entirely and leaving just Egypt to stand alone against the coming enemy. Those enemies are known today as the Sea Peoples, and they remain one of the greatest enigmas of history.
January 4, 2018
“This is what you get when you touch the Orb”
Jonah Goldberg thinks he’s identified the moment our timeline went screwy, sorta:
Ever since Donald Trump touched the Orb, praise be upon it, I’ve been making “This is what you get when you touch the Orb” jokes.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll tell you: On his trip to the Middle East in May, President Trump, along with the Saudi king and the president of Egypt, laid his hands on a glowing white orb for two minutes (which strikes me as a long time to touch an orb).
The image was like a mix of J.R.R. Tolkien and 1970s low-budget Canadian sci-fi. It looked like they were calling forth powerful eldritch energies from the chthonic depths or perhaps the forbidden zone.
Ever since then, when things have gotten weird, I’ve credited the Orb. For instance, when the Guardian reported that sex between Japanese snow monkeys and Sika deer may now constitute a new “behavioral tradition,” I tweeted, “the Orb has game, you can’t deny it.” When Roy Moore, the GOP Alabama Senate candidate, was plausibly accused of preying on teenagers and many evangelical leaders rallied to his defense, invoking biblical justifications for groping young girls, I admired the Orb’s cunning. And when the bunkered Moore decided to give one of his only interviews to a 12-year-old girl, I sat back and marveled at the Orb’s dark sense of humor.
But I know in my heart that it’s not the Orb’s fault things have gotten so weird, for the simple reason that rampant weirdness predates the Orb-touching by years.
I have a partial theory as to why, and it doesn’t begin with Trump. It begins with a failure of elites and the institutions they run.
November 27, 2017
Sea Peoples: The 1200 BC System Collapse
Space And Intelligence
Published on 7 May 2017In the 12th century B.C., after centuries of brilliance, the civilized and globalized world of the Bronze Age came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Kingdoms fell like dominoes over the course of just a few decades. No more Minoans or Mycenaeans. No more Trojans, Hittites, or Babylonians. The thriving economies and cultures of the late second millennium B.C., which had stretched from Greece to Egypt and Mesopotamia, suddenly ceased to exist, along with writing systems, technology, and monumental architecture. Could it happen again?
November 23, 2017
Transport regression
ESR linked to this article, saying “This is hands-down the most interesting article on history of technology I’ve read in a very long time. It seems the Middle East, the cradle of the wheeled cart, completely gave up on wheeled transport for 1500 years – it was displaced by, of all things, camels. Among other things, this explains the mazelike layout of old Arab cities – they’re like that because they’re optimized for walking and animal-riding, not wheeled transport.”:
When the first motor car chugged defiantly off the road and into the desert an entire epoch in world history began to pass away, the epoch of the camel. After centuries of supremacy as a transport animal, centuries that had seen it become for millions of people the romantic symbol of the entire Middle East, the stalwart camel was at last facing unbeatable competition.
Yet once before this homely drama of competition between the camel and the wheel had been played out in nearly identical fashion, only in reverse. Once, in ancient times, the Middle East teemed with carts and wagons and chariots, but they were totally driven out by the coming of the camel.
For all the discussion there has been among archeologists about why advanced societies such as those in pre-Colombian Central and South America never invented wheeled transport, there has been little notice taken of the amazing fact that Middle Eastern society wilfully abandoned the use of the wheel, one of mankind’s greatest inventions.
It did not, of course, abandon the wheel in all of its many forms. The potter’s wheel remained, and so did the huge, picturesque norias, or waterwheels of Syria. But gradually over the course of the first four or five centuries of the Christian era, and perhaps even earlier, all wheeled transport in the area, from the grandest chariot to the humblest farm wagon, passed out of existence.
As late as the 1780’s the French traveler Volney could still note, “It is remarkable that in all of Syria one does not see a single cart or wagon.” Moreover, in the Arabic and Persian languages one is hard pressed to find any vocabulary proper to either the use or construction of carts and wagons.
The most common explanation of this phenomenon is lack of, or deterioration of, roads in the Middle East, and to be sure the old Royal Road of the Persians and the whole network of Roman roads at some time fell out of repair and then passed out of use. However, roads are built for wheels and not vice versa. Their decline paralleled that of the wheel; it did not cause it.
November 8, 2017
Why Don’t Country Flags Use The Color Purple?
After Skool
Published on 17 Oct 2017For centuries purple dye was worth more than gold. The dye used to produce purple fabric came from a sea snail that only lived off the shores of modern day Lebanon. Because it was so rare, purple became associated with royalty. This is the reason you don’t see purple on country flags. It was just too expensive to produce.
Sometimes the simplest questions have extraordinary answers.
November 4, 2017
The End of Civilization (In the Bronze Age): Crash Course World History 211
CrashCourse
Published on 3 Oct 2014In which John Green teaches you about the Bronze Age civilization in what we today call the middle east, and how the vast, interconnected civilization that encompassed Egypt, The Levant, and Mesopotamia came to an end. What’s that you say? There was no such civilization? Your word against ours. John will argue that through a complex network of trade and alliances, there was a loosely confederated and relatively continuous civilization in the region. Why it all fell apart was a mystery. Was it the invasion of the Sea People? An earthquake storm? Or just a general collapse, to which complex systems are prone? We’ll look into a few of these possibilities. As usual with Crash Course, we may not come up with a definitive answer, but it sure is a lot of fun to think about.
November 3, 2017
Egyptian lawyer discovers a “duty to rape” women who wear revealing clothes
It may be just a vivid fantasy on western university campuses, but rape culture is real … in Egypt:
An Egyptian lawyer has sparked a controversy by saying that it is a “national duty” to rape women who wear revealing clothes. During a heated television debate on prostitution aired on a local television channel, the lawyer said it would be a “patriotic duty” of citizens to sexually harass such women.
Nabih al-Wahsh, a locally popular lawyer with strong conservative views, was among several guests who were debating a new draft law on prostitution broadcast on the Egyptian television channel, al-Assema. When the panel’s debates became more heated, Wahsh, at one point insisted that females wearing revealing clothes deserve to be punished.
“Would you accept a girl walking around with half of her thigh showing?” he shouted at a fellow panellist before quickly adding: “I say when a girl is walking around like that, harassing her is a patriotic duty, and raping her is a national duty.”
August 22, 2017
The Bronze Age Collapse – Lies – Extra History
Published on 12 Aug 2017
How did the Bronze Age Collapse affect civilizations other than the four discussed in our series? When trade fell apart, why didn’t those who relied on bronze switch to forging with other metals? James and Soraya look back on these questions on Lies!
